Elmer and I pulled off Highway 101 into the parking lot of the John Dellenback Trail near Lakeside. Destination: the towering and sweeping dunes one must traverse to reach the ocean. It was a sunny weekday in early winter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’d never seen this place before and relished watching Elmer run wild in this dunescape. A new adventure for us. We keep racking them up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As we exited the car, I noticed a pile of belongings, including a piece of rolling luggage in a decommissioned camp site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There was simply no way this pile could represent the possessions of a homeless person in this remote area of the Southern Oregon Coast. Impossible. Someone must have dumped the pile for some perfectly rational or inexplicable reason and driven away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The pile moved! I saw the back of a head with matted hair nod.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There was simply no way it could be a homeless person in this remote area of the Southern Oregon Coast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I stopped myself: I’d seen homeless people in much more remote places in Oregon than this. (Agness, Oregon for one.) And at least this parking lot had restrooms and water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Elmer tugged on the leash. He was raring to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We explored the dunes, and let me say for the record here: this is a must see for every Oregonian. We were extras on the set of Lawrence of Arabia<\/em> for an interminable David Lean long shot. Elmer went bonkers in the sand, running amok, running around me. I chased him and we both fell every now and then and rolled down a dune. It was the happiest I’d felt since my dad died.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We returned to the parking lot 90 minutes later, exhausted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The pile remained and the head still nodded. A park ranger drove past the pile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I decided an investigation was warranted. We would cruise by the pile on our way out of the parking lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Minutes later, I idled the car 20 feet behind the pile. The body turned my direction. It was a woman in her 50s or 60s. She was playing on her phone. I powered down the passenger side window to ask if she needed help. She glanced at me, registered nothing in her face, turned slowly around, and back to her phone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A hundred questions combusted in my mind. I’d asked the same ones a thousand times since writing about the homeless in Oregon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve probably answered a half dozen of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Elmer and I pulled off Highway 101 into the parking lot of the John Dellenback Trail near Lakeside. Destination: the towering and sweeping dunes one must traverse to reach the ocean. It was a sunny weekday in early winter. I’d never seen this place before and relished watching Elmer run wild in this dunescape. A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9679,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-meditations","category-oregon-beaches","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9678"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9681,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9678\/revisions\/9681"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}